The Fire and the Nook take the most interesting approach, focusing on delivering content via their online bookstores rather than trying to mimic the iPad's every feature. To a degree, it works.

After reviewing the Fire, I abandoned it for its main rival, the Nook Tablet. While the Nook Tablet looks nearly identical to its predecessor, the Nook Color, its new OS and internal hardware boost are enough to give Barnes & Noble another shot at wowing us with a "Readers Tablet."

Hardware

On the outside, the Nook Tablet is the same as the Nook Color I've come to know over the last year. It has the same heaviness to it. The same plastic casing and buttons (but a lighter shade of metallic gray this time). And the same weird belt loop thingy in the lower left corner. (Still not sure what that's all about.)

I'm not impressed with the Nook Tablet's design, but it's definitely better than the Fire's PlayBook-like simple rectangular look.

Barnes & Noble says the Nook Tablet is lighter than the Color, but I honestly don't notice a difference. Both feel like the same device, so despite the claims Barnes & Noble makes about a thinner and lighter tablet, there's almost no tangible difference. It simply comes down to the new screen and performance.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

According to the specs, the Nook Tablet's resolution is the same as the Nook Color's. But this time around the Nook has faster processor that seems to give the screen a nice boost. Thanks to the IPS display, you can view images and video on the screen from just about any angle without glare or losing the picture.

More importantly, when placed side by side with the Kindle Fire, the Nook Color's screen wins. It's brighter. Video looks crisper. Even books and magazines are more pleasurable to read on the Nook than the Fire. The Nook takes this round.

Under the hood, the Nook Tablet has a 1 GHz dual-core processor backed by 1 GB of RAM. That makes the performance a lot zippier than the Nook Color's. I remember testing the Nook Color in the spring (after it got its big Android update) and having it choke and crash when playing Angry Birds. With the Nook Tablet, apps, games, and video that require a lot of processing power run like a dream. The stutters and crashes are gone.

The Nook Tablet also has a Micro SD card slot tucked in a hatch beneath the belt loop. This gives you the option to load up to 16 GB more storage to the tablet on top of the 16 GB that comes with the Nook. You'll need it. The Nook Tablet doesn't have access to an online store for purchasing movies, TV shows, and music, so you'll have to get that stuff from other sources and load it up from your computer. It's a pain, but using a SD card will make it a bit easier. (More on that later.)

The Nook's New OS

When the Nook Color got its Android update in the spring, turning it from a color e-reader into a full-fledged tablet, I thought Barnes & Noble created a solid OS for a $250 machine. But as I said above, things have changed, and Barnes & Noble really needed to impress me with its new update.

Like the Nook Color's and Kindle Fire's OS, the Tablet's is based on top of Android 2.3 Gingerbread. But this is not the Android you're used to seeing. Instead, Barnes & Noble completely customized Android to focus on reading, not web browsing, e-mail, and all those other tablet-y features.

The home screen is fully customizable. You can pin apps, books, magazines, or whatever else you want to it. You can even resize your icons by pinch and zooming. My only complaint is that there's no mechanism on the home screen that snaps apps into neat rows. Unless you have pinpoint accuracy, your screen is going to look jumbled an uneven.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

At the bottom of the home screen is a carousel of recently used apps and books. You can swipe along through your recent activity and drag the stuff you want to your home screen. It functions almost exactly like the Kindle Fire's carousel.

Beneath that are more options for sections of the Nook Tablet's content library: books, newsstand (magazines and newspapers), movies, music, and apps.

It's a decent interface and easy enough to get around, but I do have one gripe. You can only access some basic features like settings and the Web browser by tapping the Nook's home button first. That pulls up another task bar for Home, Library, Shop, Search, and Apps too. It's a bit odd since that home button menu duplicates many of the items you can access straight from the main screen. It's silly and a waste of time to have to tap twice just to access the Web.

The Web browser is decent enough. It's your typical Android browser. Nothing fancy. But it did perform a lot better than the over hyped Silk browser on the Kindle Fire. No jitters or zooming problems. The only thing that really ruins the experience is the lack of a back button if you're at the bottom of a page. You have to scroll all the way back to the top first if you want to go back.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Finally, there's the notifications center. Since the Nook Tablet is a content-centric device, the notifications bar gives you updates on new magazine or newspaper issues, shows you your most recent books, and lets you know your latest Netflix recommendations.

It's the latter feature I enjoy the most. For the first time, Netflix is directly integrated into a mobile OS. By pulling down the notifications center you can see the most recent movie you watched and tap it to resume. Same goes for recommendations or other movies in your queue. There's no need to open the Netflix app and navigate through menus to pick up where you left off in a movie.

Oh, and if you're a Nook Color owner, don't worry. You're going to get the same OS as the Nook Tablet as a free update soon.

Apps, Books, Magazines, And Newspapers

Barnes & Noble's excellent selection of books, magazines, and newspapers is still available on the Nook Tablet. Not much has changed there. Just know that you won't have any trouble finding what you're looking for.

I do wish Barnes & Noble had been able to strike deals with magazine publishers to bring interactive magazines to the Nook Tablet. The Kindle Fire already has interactive magazines from Conde Nast such as Wired and The New Yorker. Instead, the Nook Tablet relies on static images of the print edition of each magazine. Hopefully more is coming.

Barnes & Noble's app store suffers from the same problem as Amazon's. Because it's separate from the official Android Market place, developers have to submit their apps to Barnes & Noble separately. That means the selection is extremely limited and a lot of basics are missing. You'll still find Pulse, MOG, Pandora, Angry Birds, and some other big titles. But a lot of basics like Facebook, Twitter, other RSS readers are missing too. To put it bluntly, a lot of what you'll find in the Nook Tablet's app store is pure junk.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

The Nook Tablet ships with a native e-mail app, but it's garbage. It's just a simple list view of your incoming messages. No snippets in the inbox. No landscape view with two panes. No direct Gmail integration for archiving messages. The e-mail app so basic it's almost useless. Don't expect to get a lot of e-mailing done on this thing.

Again, the lack of app support and sub-par tablet features like e-mail just proves that Barnes & Noble sees the Nook as a portal to buy stuff.

Movies And Music

This is where the Nook Tablet really fails. Unlike the Kindle Fire, you have no way of purchasing music or movies and downloading them directly to your tablet. Want to watch a video or listen to music? You need to find that stuff somewhere else and either drag or drop the files from your computer to the Nook or load up a Micro SD card and stick it in the back of the tablet.

You can tell Barnes & Noble tried to make up for this by making sure Hulu, Netflix, MOG, Pandora, Rhapsody, and a few other apps were ready to go at launch. But each of those services require a separate subscription to use.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

When Barnes & Noble first announced the Nook Tablet to the press two weeks ago, CEO William Lynch said they decided to skip a video and music store because they believed they weren't ready to offer it yet. Fortunately, they're perfectly fine with you loading any other files on it. (Don't worry, the Nook Tablet can play almost all the major video and music file types.)

To be clear, I think Barnes & Noble made a big mistake by not including a store for movies and music. Now Amazon has a huge advantage thanks to its robust store on the Kindle Fire.

Should You Buy It?

From a hardware perspective, I think the Nook Tablet has a slight edge over the Kindle Fire. It runs smoother, doesn't choke when browsing the web, and the screen is incredible.

But as I've said, the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire are supposed to be content devices, and the Nook is missing a lot of content. Meanwhile, the Fire puts everything at your fingertips, even giving you a two-month free trial of Amazon Prime, which includes unlimited streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows.

Oh yeah, the Fire is also $50 cheaper.

If the missing content store doesn't matter to you and you want to load up your own, then the Nook Tablet is definitely worth the $250. Otherwise, you're better off with the Fire.